SOC212: Chapter 1 On the Sociology of Deviance

-Deviance and the social reactions it evokes are key focal concerns of every community.
-Norms are subject to shifts and evolution.
-The very institutions that mandate to manage deviance tend to reinforce it.
-Once individuals have been identified as deviant, they undergo commitment ceremonies where they
are negatively labeled, thus experiencing a status change that is hard to reverse.
-Deviance is defined differently at different levels of human collectivity.
Deviant Behavior in Social Communities:
-People of a community spend most of their lives in close contact with one another, thus communities
are boundary maintaining.
-This boundary not only includes physical space, but also the set of ethos or ways within the group.
-A human community is said to maintain boundaries in the sense that its members tend to confine
themselves in a radius of activities, and any conduct that is outside of those boundaries is somehow
inappropriate or immoral.
-Human behavior can vary over an enormous range, but each community draws a set of symbolic
parenthesis around a certain segment of that range. This parenthesis is considered the boundary.
-A deviant is a person whose actions have moved outside the margins of the group.
-Members of a community inform one another about the placement of their boundaries by participating
in the confrontations which occur when someone steps outside of the boundaries or when deviants are
met by policing agents whose business is to guard the cultural integrity of the community.
-The connection between deviants, and the agents of control have always attracted public attention. In
modern times, this can be seen through the media, when often, news is broadcast about deviant
behavior and its consequences.
-Boundaries are never a fixed property of any community.
-Boundaries remain a meaningful point of reference only so long as they are repeatedly tested by
persons on the fringes of the group and repeatedly defended by people chosen to represent the group's
inner morality.
-Deviance, in controlled quantities may be an important condition for preserving the stability of social
life.
-Institutions designed to discourage deviant behavior actually operate in such a way as to perpetuate it.
Prisons for example, do little to rehabilitate it's inmates, but instead reinforce the solidarity of deviant
individuals.
-Commitment Ceremonies are events that mark a deviants change of status, for example: the criminal
trial. An important feature of these ceremonies is that they are almost irreversible.
-Unlike commitment ceremonies experienced by deviants, most provisional roles conferred by society,
offer an exit ceremony once all it's temporary advantages have been exhausted (ex: student
graduation ceremony). Thus, nothing happens to cancel out the social stigma that a deviant receives
upon returning to normal life.
-Two separate yet often competing currents are found in any society: forces that foster a high degree of
conformity, and forces that promote a certain degree of diversity. In such a scheme, the deviant is a
natural product of group differentiation, and a relevant figure in the community's overall division of
labor.